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Meet One of the Most Prolific Artists From Prison Music’s Golden Age
Listen if you like: Isaac Hayes, The Brothers Johnson, Leon Bridges
Like many session musicians, one of the most prolific and versatile performers to ever record in American prisons has a name few would recognize. But recently, while collecting and digitizing albums made behind bars, I kept seeing Morgan White’s name on record sleeves. He composed, sang and played drums and piano on at least five prison albums from 1964 to 1982, all in Texas.
White’s songs hinted at his biography. On “It’s Over,” which he wrote and performed with the Wynne Unit Band, the protagonist pleads with a lover from behind bars. But aside from his lyrics, I didn’t expect to learn more about him. Most musicians who showed up on prison records from this period are hard to find and likely deceased. So it was all the more thrilling when White, now 86 years old, picked up my call and told me about his 20-year music career in Texas prisons.
White started drumming in the 1950s as a teenager in Temple, a small city near Austin, where soldiers stationed at Fort Hood would blow off steam by gambling and dancing. A robbery put him in Texas prisons for much of the 1960s. He worked in cotton fields and saw men tortured, whipped and beaten with hoe handles. “It was really like a plantation,” he told me.
In 1964, anthropologist Bruce Jackson visited Texas correctional facilities to record work songs that were created by enslaved Black people and passed down through generations. White was housed at the Retrieve Unit, a prison operating on a former plantation, and joined an a cappella group to sing these melodies.
He soon earned his way — through good behavior — into the Texas Department of Corrections’ music program, where some men were allowed to form bands. The agency trumpeted its more humane side with a 1965 album, in which White shows off his jazz drumming skills. Here he is with a group called The Gamblers:
But the music program could not make up for the trauma of plantation work. “They put us back into society angry,” White told me. “I was a walking time bomb.” In 1977, he committed an armed robbery of a jewelry store and received a life sentence. By then, the music program had grown, and White recalls crossing paths with musicians who would later play with Diana Ross and Ray Charles.
He began to write songs featured on records sold at an annual prison rodeo. “It’s Over,” which features a “Shaft”-esque hi-hat and swirling horns, drew directly from his own experience. “When I got the life sentence, I was with a girl,” he told me. “She was my only support. But it got to a point where she stopped writing letters, and I knew something was wrong.”
Then came the annual prison rodeo. He got to leave his cell and perform for the public at a stadium. Scanning the crowd, he spotted his girlfriend in the embrace of another man. “She stopped just long enough to look up at me, and I saw her.” That was their last contact.
Four years later, he got out of prison early after winning an appeal. He gave up his clerk position in the music department, he told me, to David Crosby, who had just arrived. One of his last songs, penned behind bars, is called “Come Home.”
Unlike many of his peers, White chose to avoid the music business, having heard stories of exploitative record labels trapping Black musicians in long-term, low-paying contracts. Instead, he got a job as a research associate at Prairie View A&M, a historically Black college in East Texas. After retiring, he moved to be with family in Washington state, where he joined a church — and a gospel choir.
When you hear him sing now, it’s easy to imagine him commanding the attention of thousands of people at the rodeo, telling them all about his regrets and how hard he’s working to turn his life around, and hoping one special listener will take it to heart.
LINER NOTES:
Band: The Wynne Unit Band | Album: “The Texas Prison Rodeo Presents: Behind the Walls (1980)” | Song: “It’s Over”
Songwriter, Electric Piano, Vocals: Morgan A. White | Arranger: Tom Miller | Recording Engineer: Dale Mullins | Assistant Sound Engineer: William Brooks | Baritone Saxophone: Carlos Alvarado | Electric Bass: Jesse Borrego | Guitar: Vincent Bott | Tenor Saxophone: Phillip Campbell, Antoine Joseph | Trumpet: James Campos, John Indo, William McGill, John W. West | Percussion: Michael Curtis, Nathaniel Morgan | Banjo, Piano, Vocals: Gary Harmon | Trombone: Henry Jordan, Frank Schoenthal, Hoy Steward, Douglas Washington| Alto Saxophone: John Osborne, Claude Reneau, Frank Ricketts | Trombone and Guitar: James Richards
